Report on Compass IV Conference

Nashville Chapter Americans United helped sponsor the statewide Compass IV conference of the Tennessee Alliance for Progress April 13-14 in Nashville. The chapter had one person working on the conference and four people either attending portions or assisting with the promotion of separation of church and state there. According to these people, we had the only display on Friday, the best display on Saturday, and the only staffed display. We did not gather many names for our Network, nor did we sell any t-shirts, but we did give away about half of our literature, and our attendees talked to many people. The conference was not directed particularly toward church and state; it was more of a way to interface with other progressives, most of whom are believers in separation. A new member, David Lyle, an attorney, provided the following overview of the conference. . .



COMPASS IV - April 13-14, 2007

Denice Zeck of American Forum, Washington, DC, addressed the Friday conference on public communication strategies for local activists. One highlight of her advice is to speak frequently with local journalists who cover your issues and get to know them before you want them to publish about your group or issue. First, they’ll know to call you if they’re working an article on your issues, and, secondly, they are more likely to treat your comments as credible and useful when you call and give a lead for a story or offer them a press release. Also, write opinion pieces and submit them for publication. These are more likely to be published if the opinion editor already knows who you are. Finally, consider submitting opinion or research pieces to her group, American Forum, which will submit them to outlets around the country for publication.

Paul Waldman, scholar and author, addressed the conference on both Friday and Saturday. Waldman is a fellow with Media Matters, Washington, DC, which was founded circa 2000 in an effort by progressives to counterbalance the right-wing’s powerful influence on main stream media through rich, well-funded partisan groups such as the Heritage Foundation. Media Matters works to hold right-wing so-called “experts” accountable in the main stream media. It has numerous interns and employees who spend countless hours daily monitoring broadcast and printed speech of right-wing pundits for outrageous examples of dis-information and hate-speech. Media Matters has had several recent big successes. These included publicizing Anne Coulter’s use of an anti-gay slur to amuse a gathering of Republicans and Don Imus’ recent racist slander against the Rutger’s women’s basketball team.

Waldman spoke about his recent work and book, “Being Right is not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success.” He offered winning strategies for forming a coherent, progressive movement that will grow in strength over the coming decades just as the right-wing movement systematically grew through the hard work of a few persons starting in 1964. He points out that despite the 40-year advance the right-wing movement has in making the Republican Party its tool for its reactionary agenda, it still never achieved electoral influence over more than about 54 percent of the American electorate – not an impressive sign of so-called “permanent realignment”. He also points out that if you ask Americans voters about social security, universal health-care, and peace and justice issues, their responses already align far more with the progressive program than with the right-wing’s. In America there has always been a relatively tiny class of persons who are very well informed about policy issues and who follow campaigns and politics closely. Historically, after that tiny group, there was only the enormous class of general voters who were not involved in any particular political movements. The right-wing has built up a significant sub-group of activists to motivate voters and pressure politicians. The progressive movement will begin to exercise power correlating to the real progressivism of Americans as we build up our own corps of progressive activists into a coherent movement. The key to doing this is more and better communication among existing single-issue progressive organizations, and improved correlation of our efforts to articulate to the American people – and to the Democratic Party – just what our values and goals are about and how they relate to what America is at its best. As this consensus view continues to grow among progressives, it will wield greater influence on Democratic politicians as well as on main stream media and the electorate. Over time, we will turn the Democratic Party into the electorate’s tool for achieving the agenda of the Progressive Movement. Waldman points out that ending American involvement in the Iraqi civil war is clearly a critical short-term goal. Further, universal, single-payer health-care is an excellent long-term value commitment for the progressive movement to embrace. Security through peace, strength through diplomacy (backed by a sheathed sword) and justice through a single-payer health care will frame (and communicate) what progressive values are about and who we are. Waldman argues that if some of these goals take more than a generation to achieve, specifically citing universal health care, then they will still help to define our values for the electorate and will prove our staying power and determination to the main stream media.

The second keynote speaker was David Sirota, who works and writes out of his Montana home developing winning strategies for advancing economic justice. He also offers his work to political campaigns throughout the country that he regards as key to holding the Democratic Party accountable to the Progressive Movement. Most recently, he worked on the Ned Lamont campaign to unseat U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman, senator from Connecticut and nominally a Democrat. Sirota points out that the Lamont effort has put fear into the hearts of numerous Democratic incumbents in safe Democratic seats who fail to embrace the progressive agenda and has already helped shift the Democratic talking points in Congress incrementally toward the progressive view. His most recent book “Hostile Takeover” addresses the rich and powerful economic elites that keep changing the subject (fear, terror, sexual morality) so that a substantive debate about American economic injustice cannot take place. Mega-corporations and international business conglomerates define the terms of congressional debate by controlling campaign financing purse-strings. (Sirota cites the example of recent bankruptcy legislation that turns American families devastated by illness or death in the family into indentured servants to credit card companies.) His plan for short-term amelioration: pressure Democratic incumbents and new office-seekers to embrace Progressive values and goals through a coherent, discipline progressive movement. His long-term remedy: a sustained progressive movement that embraces comprehensive reform of campaign finance that inflicts costs on candidates for relying on private (i.e. moneyed elites) for campaign financing instead of public financing. He points out that at minimum, 60-billion in federal tax dollars annually are spent on contracts doled out as rewards to business interests that finance campaigns, most of it for monstrously out-sized and unneeded defense contracts and programs,– when just one-billion would be adequate to finance all campaigns for federal office – for a net savings of $59 billion.

-DAVID LYLE